WASHINGTON – The first 45 minutes of the movie Zero Dark Thirty contain graphic depictions of torture. CIA agents waterboard al-Qaeda’s Number Three leader, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, string him up by his wrists, bombard him with loud music and variously yell at him and sweet-talk him as they desperately try to extract information that will lead them to Osama Bin Laden.

As a result of these “enhanced interrogation” methods, agents are able to obtain the identity of a courier that ultimately leads to the discovery of Bin Laden’s Pakistan compound and his assassination. Or so the movie claims.

Zero Dark Thirty opened in movie houses across the United States this weekend after a costly promotion campaign that for several months has blanketed TV screens and billboards with the claim that the movie is the “real story” behind the 10-year hunt for Bin Laden.

Well before the movie came out, however, it stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy in which top government officials insisted that it wasn’t at all realistic because torture played no part in locating Bin Laden.

This denial of the role that torture played was odd, given the fact that the White House, the CIA and the U.S. defense department all collaborated closely with the filmmakers by granting them unprecedented access to classified information so they could come out with an authentic film that, in an election year, would help remind Americans that Barack Obama was the U.S. president who bagged America’s most-wanted man (although the film missed its original release deadline of October).

Three prominent lawmakers, including Senators John McCain, himself a victim of torture in Vietnam, and Diane Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, have denied the film’s premise that torture was effective.

“Not only did the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not provide us with key leads … it actually produced false and misleading information,” McCain said in a speech on the Senate floor.

CIA acting director Michael Morrell claimed the film “creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden. That impression is false.”

The controversy didn’t stop there. Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, ordered criminal investigations into the CIA and the defence department for leaking classified information to the filmmakers. The Republican lawmaker claimed leaks were purely political and could risk lives.

Most of this is just political posturing and will go nowhere. What it highlights, however, is the often-close collaboration between Hollywood and the U.S. government as politicians use Hollywood’s global reach to project to the world America’s greatness.

Every branch of the military, plus the CIA, has a liaison office in Hollywood in addition to a main one in Washington. Normally, this collaboration is hidden at the bottom of the credits among the thank-yous.

But Zero Dark Thirty appears to have changed that. Suddenly these collaborations are openly discussed. Commentators have tagged them with the label “Washington movies.” Three of them – Lincoln, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty – are up for best-picture Oscars this year.

There is, however, uneasiness over directors working with government. To what degree are they propagandists? Are they, as one commentator suggested, American’s versions of Leni Riefenstahl, whose propagandist documentary of the 1934 Nazi Party rally, Triumph of the Will, extolled the superhuman virtues of Nazism and the Aryan race?

Roger Stahl, a professor of communications studies at the University of Georgia who has written extensively about propaganda and the Washington-Hollywood link, said conforming to American government policies is central to these collaborations. Filmmakers who want a free aircraft carrier, jets, tanks or soldiers as “extras” on the set have to pay the price in script approval.

Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and her scriptwriter, Mark Boal, got both the airplanes and the deep access. Documents released to Judicial Watch in Washington under freedom of information laws reveal the full scope of the collaboration. The CIA and The Pentagon opened their doors and gave them access to the agents who hunted Bin Laden and the Navy Seals who planned and carried out the raid, as well as to senior CIA and Pentagon officials including Morrell.

Their joy is reflected in transcripts of meetings with the CIA.

“That’s dynamite,” Boal said to a CIA official after he outlined the high-level access he and Bigelow would receive. “You delivered … This is me happy.”

So eager was the White House to get the move made that it ignored former secretary of defense Robert Gates, who expressed concerns that leaks about the raid could jeopardize future special forces operations and endanger their families.

“They are leaking this for political reasons,” Tom Fitton, of Judicial Watch, said in an interview. “They were secretly and inappropriately co-operating with these filmmakers and doing things in such a way as to generate a criminal referral.”

Ironically, the White House was in a U.S. Appeals court Thursday, arguing that releasing pictures of Bin Laden’s dead body to Judicial Watch might result in terrorist attacks on Americans.

Stahl said the clear aim of “Washington movies” is to sell “American exceptionalism.” After the Second World War, the overall narrative was about the invincible, idolized American soldier. The historical narrative often erased the role played by Britain, the Commonwealth countries and Russia. After the debacle of Vietnam, the military turned inward and the overriding narrative thread morphed into one of salvation, such as Saving Private Ryan.

“Going behind enemy lines and rescuing one of our own has been a really strong theme,” Stahl said. “That has the function of placing all of the policy issues involved in a conflict into the margins, because the conflict becomes about the military saving itself.”

Zero Dark Thirty could represent a fresh departure, one that coincides with Obama’s killer-drone policy.

“It says, ‘We have eyes everywhere, we have a vast surveillance network and we are going to find you and snuff you out, extra-judiciously, and if we have to torture we will because it works,’ ” Stahl said.